I love you. I needed a bit of madness today.

Also:

"Pardosa glacialis are apparently well known for snacking on...insufficiently alert sexual partners. Enormous and correspondingly peckish lady spiders might control most of the rest of their species for us, leaving only relatively small numbers to be occasionally culled by game wardens armed with cruise missiles"

So a bit like the comments section here with Ms Bee, then?

Steven R

Skull and crossbones, because if these buggers get to Siberia and the Eurasian mainland, that's all that will be left of us.

Sounds like Starship Troopers, where's Denise Richards?! Sign me up.

This is only slightly more scientific than some of the Climate Change research I have seen. Well done.

Also, you want to be careful that this doesn't end up in national panic a la Daily Mail and swine flu.

...a bit of a slow news day Lewis?

Mine's the coat with the spider-silk ceramic armour pads in the pockets.....

Get that screenplay finished, Lewis!

:-( :-( :-(

I always knew spiders were really aliens that will one day take over the world. Anything with eight legs, six eyes and two penises is clearly not natural.

Can we havest the silk from these puppies to make suits that are stab resistant, harder than kevlar, etc? Sounds like just the trick for my neighborhood.

Paris, because there is nothing hard about her silk thingies

They'll come swarming out of their Systems That Must Be Defended in massive commercial engined dreadnoughts and gunboats!! Doomed... DOOMED I TELLS YA!!!!

Probably find that fleshy human young are just the right size for snacking on too...

Maybe we can train Penguins in Asymmetrical Warfare to cull them down?

Maybe the military could domesticate these badass beasts. Some great cyber tomfoolery perhaps, mount a chaingun, a Hellfire or two - the ultimate unmanned combat vehicle - if it runs out of ammo, it can devour it's enemies.

Sounds surprisongly like something out of Command & Conquer Red Alert....

The stuff of nightmares, and no mistake. By my calculations, you would need a broom approximately 176m tall to shift one of these monsters.

Our old friend Megarachne, a monster invertebrate 34cm in the body, was reclassified as an eurypteryid rather than an arachnid back in 2005, so the crown of "world's largest spider" is once again up for grabs.

http://www.sedgwickmuseum.org/about/news/05spider.html

I propose we train up some of those robo turkeys you found while leafing through your copy of National Geographic this morning. No point in risking fleshies when tackling this menace.

Oh - that's ok then. 2 meters is NOTHING to worry about.

The main reason we don't already have Humvee-sized arthropods is their method of respiration. Rather than lungs, they use a system of long, thin tubes that deliver oxygen to their internal parts. Beyond a certain length, these tubes can't reach the innards without collapsing. Existing large insects and spiders grow about as big as this limit allows; further growth would require the evolution of a different respiration technique.

Sea-dwelling arthropods are not subject to the same limits, as spider crabs and lobsters demonstrate (not to mention prehistoric 2m water-scorpions).

You describe them as cannibals. If so, then why not just let them eat one another.

Problem solved.

Will this work out? Don't they exchange gasses via simple book lungs, and are hence limited in size by simple stoichiometric problems?

If they appear, we all watch Starship Troopers and know how to top em all.

you are my hero

now take up your anti spider launcher and go get the buggers!!!

One more thing to keep me from sleeping!

I say we take pre-emptive action and exterminate them when they reach, say, a metre long.

"top arachno-boffin Toke Høye"

I think someone's being toking a bit too much. Sheer reefer madness.

They may be strong versus bullets but evidence suggests low to mid-level parties of adventurers with a good balance of combat classes and magic users should be able to take them down quickly enough if there is a bit of XP in it for them.

Or Doom. Wasn't the final boss a big brain spider with mechanical legs and a chain gun that never ran out of ammo.

Perhaps we should send some marines to deal with them before they get to that point.

A perfect excuse to upgrade from the .50 cal Barrett to a 20mm Lahti, methinks.

My guess is that an old lady would have to swallow a pretty large fly to feel justified in sticking one of these down her throat.

...and think of the size of the bird that she'd need to swallow to catch the spider!

...and nuke the site from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

...But think of the advances in Weaponry in that same 50 year period! sholder launched nukes anyone?

Or maybe I'll just jump on its back, machine gun a hole in its armour and throw a HE grenade in. :D

Surely the annual growth is not the point? The point is actually the increase in warmth to get it that 10% bigger. So by the time they'd all reached that size we'd pretty much have all died from being roasted to death anyway.

Still made me laugh though!

Aim for the nerve stem, and put it down for good.

According to the referenced article on msnbc,

"It’s even been said that a strand of spider silk the width of a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 in flight."

So not only will be be awash with gigantic, un-killable, flesh-molesting arachnids, we'll be bombarded by falling trans-oceanic jumbo jets knocked from the sky by the anal projections of our new hairy overlords. Perfect! I blame the scientists.

Mine's the one with the hard-hat and directions to the nearest bomb shelter in the pocket.

"The main reason we don't already have Humvee-sized arthropods is their method of respiration. Rather than lungs, they use a system of long, thin tubes that deliver oxygen to their internal parts. Beyond a certain length, these tubes can't reach the innards without collapsing. Existing large insects and spiders grow about as big as this limit allows; further growth would require the evolution of a different respiration technique."

Errm... not so. _Insects_ and many other arthropods use spiracles, as you describe. Spiders, however, have 'book lungs'. This means that the max size limit is not imposed by problems with breathing, but by the cube-square law. That scales things down a little, but still allows spiders to achieve sizes in the 2 to 3 metre range. Much beyond that and they'll have problems with their exoskeletons in general and their legs in particular. A two or three metre spider would still be somewhat difficult to dispatch with anything this side of a .50 calibre machine gun. Personally I'd go with a flame-thrower, or, better yet, a nice A-10 with a 30-mm Gatling gun and underwing pylons loaded with napalm and cluster munitions.

Duh! Obvious solution to the problem!

wut lvls I need be to hunt greenlands zones?!? I can go at 2???? Or wuold 3be bettr???? KTHXBAI!!

Armour be damned - aim for the eye clusters!

By the time they get to the size of the family dog, we should already be dispatching them. Or does everyone else wish to wait until they are as big as Humvees? Wonder if there will be Boone and Crockett scores kept on the larger ones.

*** Spider-head trophies are a figure of speech, since a spider actually does not have a head, but a cephalothorax.